Jeremiah Horrigan: When a pair of fast kids counted as draft technology

The multi-million-dollar melodrama that was the NFL Draft wasn't always such a big deal. Time was, all it took to make it happen was a couple of telephones and two skinny kids willing to work for the occasional hot chocolate and a chance to see former President Harry Truman.

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By Jeremiah Horrigan

recordonline.com

By Jeremiah Horrigan

Posted Apr. 28, 2013 at 2:00 AM

By Jeremiah Horrigan
Posted Apr. 28, 2013 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

The multi-million-dollar melodrama that was the NFL Draft wasn't always such a big deal. Time was, all it took to make it happen was a couple of telephones and two skinny kids willing to work for the occasional hot chocolate and a chance to see former President Harry Truman.

It was nearly 50 years ago. I was 14 and my brother Joe was 12 when we ran the American Football League's 1964 secret college draft in Manhattan. By "ran," I mean we did exactly that; we dashed all day down Fifth Avenue with the names of each team's draft picks clutched in our sweaty little hands.

A bit of background for non-boomers: The AFL was "the other league," the upstart brainchild of millionaires like Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams and Ralph Wilson, guys with tons of money who had not been allowed to buy NFL franchises of their own.

Millionaires don't take kindly to rejection. So eight of them got together and started a league of their own, and started hitting the solons of the NFL where it hurt most — in the pocketbook.

For the first time in years, NFL teams had to bid for the services of the country's top collegiate prospects. The AFL "stole" any number of big-name college stars in its early years, and they did so under the auspices of a secret college draft.

That's where Joe and I came in.

Although undersized and painfully skinny (our combined weights barely equaled that of a tackling dummy's), we made up for our deficits with what's now called certain "intangibles," such as our willingness to work for free.

It also helped that our father was the PR director for the AFL. We couldn't have done it without him.

Here's how it worked: Joe and I would hang around the league office on Fifth Avenue until one adult or another, after taking a phone call from a team rep, wrote down the name of a college player and handed it off to one of us. We would then take off down Fifth Avenue, dodging people and cars all the way, to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where we'd hand off the note to another adult. Then we'd scurry back to Fifth Avenue, where the process started all over again.

I have no idea why running two kids around Manhattan was deemed necessary or even wise. Nor do I have any idea whose names we delivered. You could say that information was out of our hands.

The thrill of running the draft that day was in knowing we held the future, not only of the college prospects, of entire football teams and the league itself in our hands.

We were superheroes with secret identities that day. No one knew, no one would even guess, that those two annoying kids weren't just being annoying. Much was at stake. We were on a mission. A secret mission.

It didn't even matter that we never saw Harry Truman, though we did drink a lot of hot chocolate. The former president was the Waldorf Astoria's most prominent resident back then. But even if we'd spotted him, I doubt we would have stopped to gawk. Had he known our secret, I think Harry would have understood. A former president, of all people, would surely have understood the how it was to hold the fate of thousands in his hands.